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Affiliate Tactics – Disposable URLs and “Front” Websites
Sophisticated URL hijackers seem to have settled on a set of tactics designed to minimize the discoverability of their affiliate ID. They’ve learned that their ads are discoverable and have been...
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Google loosens trademark policies
Last week Google announced two significant changes to its trademark policies: The largest change will allow competitors to purchase trademarked terms in most of the European countries that were...
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Hogan Blaming Fraud on Corruption within Program
In a recent, controversial blog post Shawn Hogan has alleged that eBay program managers manipulated him into employing “grey area” techniques by assuring him there wouldn’t be consequences for breaking...
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Efficient Affiliate Outreach
It’s now easy to contact infringing affiliates from inside PoachMark! From any ad detail page, just click the “Contact Affiliate” button. We’ll save the affiliate’s email address for future use and...
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HTTPS everywhere on BrandVerity and How to Protect Yourself from Firesheep
The recent flutter about Firesheep, prompted us to do something we really should have done a long time ago: Transition our entire site to SSL. Of course, our password, payment and other sensitive pages...
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Increased Support for In-house Programs
Do you run an in-house affiliate program that uses your own (or a third party) technology to track affiliates? We recently improved our support for in-house programs and are now able to provide the...
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Fresher Data
We understand the importance of knowing that the data you are viewing is as fresh as possible. We’ve always delivered data the same day it was collected and have steadily reduced the time it takes to...
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CJ API Integration
BrandVerity PoachMark now integrates with the Commission Junction API! A number of aspects within PoachMark are now enhanced due to this integration. We are able to provide a much more comprehensive...
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Affiliate Network Accounts can Easily be Stolen over WiFi – Protect yourself...
Be careful this Affiliate Summit when using WiFi. The affiliate accounts at many major networks vulnerable to being hijacked by Firesheep, which means your account could be quite easily compromised....
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AdWords to Make All Display URLs Lowercase
There’s a small but significant change being made to AdWords this week you should be aware of. Google announced they will now display only lowercase domains in ads, for example...
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Bing Brings Big Updates to Trademark Policy
Bing’s announced some big changes to their paid search advertising policy that will allow the use of trademarks in ad text and as keywords for triggering ads, closely mirroring Google’s update last...
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adCenter Introducing Quality Score
If there was any lingering doubt over Microsoft’s ambitions, their latest adCenter announcement makes it clear they’re aiming right at AdWords. Note that, at least for now, adCenter’s Quality Score...
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Implications of the ECJ Interflora AdWords Opinion
The European Court of Justice’s (ECJ) provided an opinion last week that Marks & Spencer(M&S) violated Interflora’s trademark rights by purchasing (but not using) search keywords that contained...
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Website down
We’re currently experiencing issues with our website as a result of the ongoing problems with Amazon’s EC2 hosting service. The result of the outage has been to significantly slow the website. Web...
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Affiliate accounts for sale
One of the challenges for affiliate managers is recognizing when an affiliate account has changed hands. This will usually accompany a change in tactics and usually for the worse. The same can be said...
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PoachMark Updates
We’re always looking for new ways to make monitoring and contacting affiliates easier and more efficient, so we’re pleased to announce several new updates to PoachMark that do exactly that. One...
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Google Bans co.cc from its Search Results
In the last week, Google removed approximately 11,000,000 websites from their organic search results: all websites with co.cc domains. This decision on the part of Google to remove all websites with...
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Google Mobile Targeted by Affiliate Hijackers
Part of the agenda of an affiliate hijacker is to always stay one step ahead of merchants by continuously exploiting new methods of hiding fraudulent ads and avoiding detection. Here at BrandVerity,...
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Networks Adopting Blackhat Tactics
Last week, Jonathan Mayer, a graduate student at the Stanford Institute for Internet and Society, released a blog post reporting that Epic Marketplace, a major US advertising network and member of the...
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PoachMark Now Decrypts Pepperjam Affiliate Links
At BrandVerity we constantly attempt to make finding and contacting abusive affiliates easier for our clients. One hurdle that often stands in the way of easily discovering an affiliate’s identity is...
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